This invention relates to memorial floral holders or supports, particularly to a cemetary flower or plant material holder.
The patent to Bowers et al, U.S. Pat. No. 3,136,510, issued Jun. 9, 1964 is an example of a holder for a cemetary wreath. It is designed to be imbeded in the ground and hold a conventional circular wreath close to the ground. Another cemetary wreath holder is provided by Roach et al, U.S. Pat. No. 1,958,716, issued May 15, 1934. Roach et al is also designed to be imbeded in the ground and hold a conventional circular wreath close to the ground. They will obscure the marker engraving in many cases.
The patent to Wilkins, U.S. Pat. No. 2,774,186, issued Dec. 18, 1956, discloses a floral basket holder for funeral use and includes separate anchor pins to be driven into the ground. The basket is thereby held close to the ground, for outdoor use.
French 2605489 discloses a flowerpot holder having ground inserted legs. A horizontal bar 6 supports flowerpot holders 9,10. Grave markers (xe2x80x9cTombesxe2x80x9d in French) are mentioned. The pots appear to be pinned to the ground.
The above mentioned patents disclose structure that is not suitable for holding general floral material at a gravesite. They are fixed in size and proportions so that they may not be adapted to different gravesites. Further, the structures of the above patents would not provide suitable ease of assembly and installation even if capable of being scaled or modified to hold general floral material. Packaging size and storage space are always important in a commercial product, and the above-mentioned prior art are not optimized for efficient packaging.
The present inventor has analyzed the above prior art to discover the above-mentioned problems, has identified and analyzed causes of the problems, and provided solutions to the problems. The discovery and analysis of the problems, the identification and analysis of the causes, and the provision of solutions are each parts of the present invention.
Therefore, the invention recognizes and analyzes a need to solve the above problems. The embodiment provides an efficiently packageable kit of parts that may be assembled and installed as a memorial floral holder without tools by an unskilled consumer and adjusted to aesthetically accomodate different sized memorials without obscuring engraving. When installed, the present embodiment provides a reliable structure that will hold up under the elements encountered at a cemetary, but yet be easily dissassembled and efficiently stored without permanent deformation.
The embodiment provides ground stakes that are easily inserted into the ground, have self aligning features and securely hold an arch assembly selectively composed of one or more flexible straight portions elastically bendable, and which straight portions are connected to each other and the ground stakes to provide different size arches to hold floral material thereon.